selectively enable/disable icloud sync

In the next few days my (first) apple smartphone will be delivered to me... before starting to use it I have one question, though.

Is possible to only selectively enable icloud syncing?

Since I'm planning to use an outlook.com account for keeping calendar, contacts and email in sync, I do not want to have that (redundant) data on a separate apple cloud. Backup will be taken care of locally. The only feature of icloud that appeals to me is the shared photo streams.

My concern is that enabling/disabling icloud is an "all-or-nothing" decision.. can anyone shed some light on this please?